Paintings Above a Fireplace

A fireplace is the natural focal point of any room it stands in, and the wall above it is where the eye goes first. That makes it the place for one strong picture, sized to the mantel and hung a little lower than you might expect.

One piece, not a cluster

The space above a mantel is a stage for a single work. A gallery wall there competes with the fireplace itself, and small pieces look scattered against the solid mass of a chimney breast. If you love several pictures, group them elsewhere and give the mantel the best one. The only exception is a deliberate pair, two identical frames either side of a central mirror or a TV.

Width: two thirds of the mantel

Most designers size art above furniture at two thirds to three quarters of the furniture’s width, and a mantel is no different. Over a 66 in (168 cm) mantel shelf that means a picture 44 to 50 in (112 to 127 cm) wide. Measure the shelf itself, not the opening below it.

When the chimney breast is narrower or wider than the shelf, scale to the chimney breast: the picture should sit comfortably within it with a few inches of wall either side. Do not scale to the firebox or the hearth, which are far smaller than the wall the picture hangs on.

Height: closer than usual

Above a sofa the gap between furniture and frame is 6 to 10 in. Above a mantel it can be smaller, 4 to 8 in (10 to 20 cm), about 6 in usually, because the mantel already raises the art well above the 57 to 60 in eye level that galleries use. Hanging higher only pushes the picture toward the ceiling.

Height of the art itself is limited too. With a 48 in mantel and an 8 ft ceiling there are 48 in of wall above the shelf, and a picture about two thirds of that, 32 in (81 cm) tall, fills it without crowding. A 24 × 36 in print with a 3 in mat comes to 44½ in wide and 32½ in tall in a 1¼ in frame: almost exactly right. The art size calculator works this out for your own mantel and ceiling.

Landscape or square

Mantels are wide, so landscape pictures suit them best: a river, a coast, a field of haystacks, a still life laid out along a table. Square works suit a narrow chimney breast. Tall portrait-format paintings tend to look like a column standing on the shelf, so save them for a pair or for a room with very high ceilings.

Heat and soot rise

If you light real fires, the wall above the fireplace gets warm, and smoke and soot drift upward over the years. That is no place for a canvas you could not replace. Hang a good print there, behind glass or acrylic, and keep the precious original elsewhere. A mantel shelf helps by deflecting rising heat; on a working fireplace without a shelf, keep art off the chimney breast entirely. A gas or electric fire, or a fireplace kept for show, raises none of these worries.

When a TV shares the wall

A TV above a fireplace already sits high, so art above it ends near the ceiling and stacks three things on one wall. Two better answers: hang a pair of paintings either side of the TV, their centers level with the screen’s center, or lean a framed print on the mantel shelf, slightly off center, so the wall still has something to look at when the screen is dark. A dark, moody painting nearby keeps the black rectangle of the screen from being the darkest thing in view.

Paintings for the mantel

Paintings above the fireplace collects the landscape and square works whose real size suits a mantel, each shown to scale above a fireplace. The living room has more, and its mock-up lets you try any of them on your wall color.